Skyrim’s varied gameplay systems?

It has stealth, it has magic, it has melee combat, it has ranged combat, it has dialogue options for talking your way through stuff, it has multiple ways of solving quest lines…

It’s basically Skyrim, if it was smaller and more focused, with better combat, voice acting, level design, and heads and tails better writing.

From a mechanistic standpoint I think that mostly has to do with the high cost of entry for games.

At $80-$100 for a full priced game these days, it’s hard to just buy on a whim. The only time you would is when they’re on sale, which happens well after initial release. So initial sales of games are basically entirely driven by reviews and online discourse (which itself has an effect on reviews), and you basically just have a bunch of people all waiting for the signal to buy or not.

I do think that services like Gamepass are a genuinely good way of reducing that effect, because now anyone can try anything on a lark.

People are complaining about Avowed? What the fuck is wrong with them?

I’ve been too busy loving it to be online reading anything, honestly cannot fathom what their complaints are tho. Avowed has repeatedly impressed me by being more clever and nuanced than I was expecting a game to be, in writing, level design, and combat.

Is this more dumb gamer anti-woke hysteria?

Imagine thinking that 80 million Germans would invade 540 million Europeans.

Imagine saying that with a straight face in 1939.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania would likely be first as they are surrounded by water, Russia, and Belarus.

Honestly, America just seems in a death spiral across so many different factors, and the only solution to basically any of them is having faith in government, but the government has repeatedly failed them so many times that people don’t.

Like lack of fixing lead and pollution problems creates dumber people, less able to hold their government to account.

Lack of strong public education makes people think that governments can’t run schools, so they pull their kids and money into private schools which makes public schools worse. It also makes people dumber and less able to hold their government to account.

Lack of public healthcare means that people don’t understand that the government can really effectively and efficiently run a utility that helps them at the lowest points of their lives.

Like, American GDP per capita, is ~$90,000, Canada’s is roughly ~$55,000. We should not be able to provide comparable government services, and yet every time I went down to the states I’d notice notably worse infrastructure, on top of all the services and safety nets that I knew they weren’t getting.

Pretty sure the American people being some combination of undereducated, lead poisoned, religious, and just plain greedy, is what did it.